Katie Von Schleicher: ‘I have a lot of anger. I think most women do’
Following the release of her new album, Consummation, the Brooklyn-based artist talks to Roisin O’Connor about Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the MeToo movement, and female rage
Few artists do white-hot fury quite like Katie Von Schleicher. Her lo-fi 2015 mini-album, Bleaksploitation, was described by one critic as “histrionic”, which she has previously said rattled her because it was “a word my mom repeated throughout my childhood to shame other women who were emotional, or to imply they were unstable”. On its follow-up, 2017’s Shitty Hits – pitched as “Portishead meets The Beatles” – she opened with “The Image”, a brutal, frustrated exhalation. And on her new album, Consummation, she erupts with searing honesty about how, on one new song, “You Remind Me”, she “can’t confine my rage”. Her music is full of the same visceral energy that drives artists such as Sharon Van Etten, Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple.
The New York-based musician’s songs are such a candid unburdening that it is perhaps unsurprising to hear that she often finds conveying emotions in real life a challenge. Specifically, how to level her frustration at men. “I’ve struggled to feel graceful with anger,” she says. “I don’t feel this talking to women. But I’ve struggled with trying to find a language that translates out [to others].” She says of a past romantic relationship how, “I felt if I could just find the right words to express myself, I wouldn’t make someone so angry at me.” In her music, she self-flagellates with jagged piano chords, her voice raining down on each track like gasoline to which she lights the match.
Von Schleicher’s new record has distilled this intensity into something catchier, poppier, but still honest and full of zeal, with buzzsaw distortion on the guitars – sharp enough to take a man’s head clean off – and dangerously silky vocals. She speaks over Zoom from her airy (“insanely cheap”), light-filled apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where the 33-year-old moved from her hometown in Pasadena, Maryland, having graduated with a degree in songwriting from Berklee College of Music in Boston. The living room is filled with stacks of books arranged in a kind of ordered chaos. Behind her is a smaller room with an upright piano. The window in the living room is open, letting the sounds of her street filter through; a man in a pick-up truck outside begins blaring his horn. Von Schleicher tells me some of the vocal takes on this album have hip-hop in the background from the times her neighbours would blast their beats from the pavement below.
Consummation was inspired in part by Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo – about a former detective hired to investigate his friend’s wife – but perhaps even more by feminist readings of the film and its subtexts of emotional abuse. She was particularly influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which provided the title with its description of the “wandering, stalking, haunting” kind of romantic pursuit that Vertigo depicts as “consummation”. In fact, Solnit suggests, it’s as though the woman is being overwhelmed by the man’s will rather than permitted her own agency. Von Schleicher first saw the film in college, more than a decade ago, when she was addicted to books by Henry Miller and Bret Easton Ellis. Now she’s drawn to female voices in literature – Carmen Maria Machado, Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney to name a few – and found herself – “there’s only one word for it,” she says – “triggered” when she rewatched Vertigo in 2017.
At that time, she was in a difficult relationship, one she knew was “not going to be good for anyone involved”. She speaks haltingly, not because she seems reluctant to discuss it, but as though she hasn’t worked out how to outside of her music yet. “I felt like I should know how to love myself enough to avoid a situation that’s bad or unhealthy,” she says. Her mother was in an abusive relationship before she was born; she tells me this frankly, with the implication that she believes it had some impact on her own romantic relationships. It’s her mother pictured embracing Von Schleicher on the album art – her blonde hair is uncannily similar to Kim Novak’s in Vertigo, and the pose recalls one between Novak and James Stewart.
“[Vertigo] reminds me of relationships with men, it can remind me of childhood… watching [the detective] Scottie and how he treats Judy [the woman who impersonates Madeleine, the wife of Scottie’s friend] I feel total distress, like I’m flailing,” Von Schleicher says, recalling a scene in which Judy dresses to look like Madeleine again, in order to make Scottie be in love with her. As the #MeToo movement gathered pace, she found herself looking at things through a new lens.
“I have a lot of anger,” she says. “I think most women do.” That lyric from “You Remind Me” brings to mind footage of women speaking about their #MeToo experiences, and the way so many of them jump to scold themselves for showing “too much” emotion as though – even after everything – they’re still oppressed by society’s fear of female wrath. But Von Schleicher, who wrote the record while still in that relationship and processing what was happening to her, tries to let her fury fly freely. “I think my records are too much for people, too emotional,” she says. “But I want something to be pulverising. Not to be dramatic, but for it to commit to whatever the artist is trying to express.”
On whether the music industry will ever have its big “MeToo moment”, she seems uncertain. “Yeah, because we only took down Ryan Adams,” she says with a short laugh. “You know what’s f***ed up, is that within each industry, everyone knows who those guys are.” She mentions a Facebook group she knows of where women who worked at the same record label shared their experiences “about a powerful man who worked there”.
It reminded her of working at restaurants in her twenties: “S***, I mean, #MeToo might not have hit the music industry but it definitely hasn’t hit the restaurant industry, or any other one where people are even less protected from sexual harassment.” There was a defensive reaction spawned by #MeToo, she suggests where men become terrified that they’re going to be accused of something. She sighs – even the subject of women’s efforts to convey their feelings to men without reprisal is exhausting. If it were possible, she’d only ever be interviewed by women, she says wistfully. “I’d love to choose.”
As we’re discussing female artists having their own spaces and platforms to work with, the man in the pickup truck blasts his horn again: another man drowning out the voices of women. On her new album, though, Von Schleicher refuses to be quiet. That palpable rage is something that will speak not just to women, but anyone who chooses to listen.
Consummation is out now
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